information overload

John Naisbitt says in his book ‘Megatrends’, “Running out of information is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” (Page 16).
The problem with information is that it is so easy to create, reproduce and distribute. Consider your emails. How many do you get each day? How many of these have merely been forwarded from other sources?
In the Industrial Age, it took something to write good content. Today with information processing technology it is relatively easy to create good content. Consider writing a book by hand versus using a computer and word processing software.
When we are drowning in information and there is simply too much of it to manage, it is called ‘information overload’. Another way of saying this is that the information has insufficient ‘structure’.
In contrast to creating physical goods, information needs structure and organization to be useful. For example, a page of numbers may make little sense compared to the elegant and simple line of the numbers plotted on a graph. The graph provides structure for the data.